Nam June Paik’s Etude 1 and the Indeterminate origins of Digital Media Art GrEGory ZINMAN You dig up ruins after ruins to understand the past, as if you know something about the present. But we know about the present as little as about the past. —Nam June Paik, “Archaeology,” undated1 A stack of punch cards. A printout of fortrAN 66 computer code. An image on thermofax paper. An experimental film. Each of these is Etude 1 (1967), a digital artwork by pioneering media artist Nam June Paik that I recently discov- ered in the archives of the Smithsonian American Art Museum—and yet, Etude 1 is none of them. Paik is best known for his treated televisions, such as Magnet TV (1965); his single-channel videotapes, such as Global Groove (1973); his multi-channel room- sized installations, such as Electronic Superhighway (1995); and his anthropomorphic media assemblages, such as the Family of Robot series (1986). for these works, Paik is credited with establishing video as an artistic medium—and rightly so; his work transformed the landscape of twentieth-century art, and even anticipated a num- ber of developments in the twenty-first. Etude 1 does not fit into any of these cate- gories, however. In fact, it is not a work of video art at all. Etude 1 is an early digital artwork, one of the first ever made. But more than its primacy, its indeterminate status—both as an artwork and as an artifact—helps us rethink the nature of the archive, art’s digital past, and film’s place in computational media. In the early 1960s, a small group of engineers at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, New Jersey—already an epicenter of technological innovation—began to explore how computer graphics might be employed to enhance human-computer interac- tion, and started to experiment with making digital art.2 the engineers were not 1. Nam June Paik, “Archaeology,” n.d. Nam June Paik Archives, Smithsonian American Art Museum, box 12, folder 2. Paik also used this phrase in “random Access Information,” Artforum 19, no. 1 (September 1980), p. 49. 2. At the time, Bell Labs was one of the premier communications research-and-development facilities in the United States. owned jointly by At&t and the Western Electric Company, the institu- tion was primarily interested in the display of scientific data, and worked with the US government on many projects, including Project Nike, an anti-aircraft-missile system, and NASA’s Apollo program. for OCTOBER 164, Spring 2018, pp. 3–28. © 2018 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo_a_00321 by guest on 23 September 2021 4 oCtoBEr trained as artists, however, so they invited practicing painters and filmmakers, including Stan VanDerBeek and Lillian Schwartz, to take up residence at the com- pany.3 Paik was invited to be an artist at Bell Labs from early 1967 to 1968. there, he produced the film now known as Digital Experiment at Bell Labs (ca. 1967) and the Dada-inspired print Confused Rain (1967).4 Such artworks, forged in a corpo- rate r&D lab with close ties to American military and space programs that never- theless fostered an environment in which artists and engineers could conduct con- ceptual and aesthetic investigations into technology, serve as the unlikely seeds from which our current digital mediascape has emerged. While it may be easy, from our present vantage, to trace the emergence of the digital arts and digital filmmaking back to Bell Labs, it was not true that the artists—or, for that matter, the engineers—perceived the shift from analog to digi- tal in this way. Etude 1 endures as one of the very first digital artworks produced by an artist who was not first trained as a computer engineer. But in spite of the musi- cal reference in its title, it is not at all clear if Etude 1 was part of the “computer opera” that Paik mentioned throughout his correspondence at the time, nor is it evident if the final work was intended to be the single image preserved in the Smithsonian archive, or if Paik planned to film the image as it was being plotted, thereby producing an animation. By digging through the “ruins” of Etude 1 as it exists in the archive, as well as by exploring how its traces linger outside of that site, I will chart a conceptual history of the digital arts that productively compli- cates our notions of digital and computational media as being teleological pro- gressions from earlier, analog sources. With this assertion, I bear in mind thomas Elsaesser’s framing of the digital “as the chance to rethink the idea of historical change itself, and what we mean by inclusion and exclusion, horizons and boundaries, but also by emergence, trans- formation, appropriation, i.e., the opposite of rupture.”5 As I see it, rethinking the history of the digital arts, and of digital media more generally, requires less a map- ping of boundaries than a tracing of the passage of objects and individuals across zones of media practices, and an exploration of how artists imagined their own more on this history, see Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New york: Penguin Press, 2012). 3. VanDerBeek began working with programmer Kenneth Knowlton in 1965; next, robert rauschenberg and Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver approached the facility about collaborating on the series of multimedia events known as 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering, out of which developed Experiments in Art and technology (E.A.t.), an organization dedicated to fostering collaborations between artists and engineers. the practice was quickly adopted by other computer-research labs, including MIt’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and IBM, which began an artist-in-residence pro- gram in 1966, when animator John Whitney Sr. began working with digital computers for the first time. 4. While the date given for Digital Experiment is 1966, it is unlikely that it was made that early. A. Michael Noll has suggested that the two portions of the film have different dates, although the work’s resolution makes it difficult to confirm this. A. Michael Noll, email to the author, May 16, 2015. 5. thomas Elsaesser, “the New film History as Media Archaeology,” Cinemas 14, no. 2/3 (Spring 2004), p. 78. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo_a_00321 by guest on 23 September 2021 Nam June Paik. Etude 1. 1967. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik Archive. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo_a_00321 by guest on 23 September 2021 6 oCtoBEr paths across such areas. In many ways, the course charted by Paik resists conven- tional mapping entirely. He was emphatically in favor of blurring boundaries whenever possible, or redrawing them to suit his own objectives—not only concep- tually, as in Etude 1, but also literally, as in his 1963 drawing Fluxus Island in Décollage Ocean, a work of creative cartography that maps artists, concepts, associ- ates, and in-jokes across an imaginary landmass. Paik’s intermedial art therefore enables a generative dismantling of the familiar media history that moves from film to video to the digital in favor of examples—rooted in the art itself—of how intentions and practices can exist prior to specific technologies, be informed and modified by their encounters with those technologies, and then be further employed in and reconfigured by other mediatic expressions. Four Indeterminacies I found Etude 1 just over four years ago, while conducting research at the Smithsonian’s Nam June Paik Archive. the archive, which was acquired in 2009— three years after Paik died at the age of seventy-three—consists of the contents of the artist’s three Manhattan studios. the materials include robots, toys, paintings, works on paper, scores of antique radios and televisions, over two hundred video- tapes, and hundreds of books, as well as fifty-five linear feet of Paik’s writings and correspondence. It was in this paper archive that I came across a series of folders relating to Paik’s time at Bell Labs. I first greeted the contents of the folders—stacks of computer punch cards and reams of printouts of code—with pleasant surprise. Some of these printouts, which I later determined to be authored in fortrAN 66, were labeled “Paik Study,” and were numbered 1 through 12. Another printout, labeled “Etude 1,” was placed directly on top of a piece of thermal paper, yellowed with age, depicting an image of four concentric circles, each created by a set of overlapping capital let- ters. Breaks in the circular forms revealed the words that composed the image: LoVE, HAtE, GoD, and DoG. I suspected that the printout of code corresponded to the image, but there was no way to put this hypothesis to the test; fortrAN 66, unlike later versions of the programming language, could only be compiled—that is, translated from human-generated code to machine-readable format—to run on the mainframes of that era; no fortrAN 66 compilers currently exist. All I could do was learn to read the code.6 the printout bears a date in the upper-left-hand corner of the page: october 24, 1967. the code features a repeated command, CALL tSP, which, as I later learned, is a function that plots a point on a grid. the tSP is the name of a sub- routine found in a shared code library that would have been used by the program- 6.